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Magical Aspecting
Magical Aspecting All magic in the conjured lands has an aspect. When Eztel was sundered apart, her form was flung to every part of creation so that she became synonymous with creation. This is what created magic and gave the universe access to a portion of the power of the Great Gods. Aspecting is how a sentient being acquires power from any object external to him or herself. The Aspect of the Good A conjuration is considered aspected towards good when it favors the consent of all participants in the magical working. A practitioner aspected towards good has to obtain consent before working magic and works within the confines of the powers inherent in other things. Since everything in creation is proto-sentient due to partaking in the body of Eztel, in order to work any magic one must obtain the consent of everything. Good-aspected magic is extremely powerful but slow and cumbersome, often requiring years of permission-seeking as well as study and discipline. Example: A good-aspected practitioner wishes to bury his enemy in rocks. To do this, he spends twenty years learning to commune with the proto-sentience of different types of geological formations and elements. Having learned to commune with and negotiate with different types of rocks, he continuously makes contact with the rocks around him wherever he goes. When his enemy is sighted, he asks the basalt or granite under his enemies feet to swallow his enemy. Given his reputation among the community of basalt and granite rocks, they oblige and swallow his enemy, neutralizing the threat. However, he usually has to pay for this and must frequently wait a long time before he makes such insane demands of the basalt and granite communities. The Aspect of Evil A conjuration is aspected towards evil when it ignores the consent of the elements being used. As such, there is a substantial amount of resistance that diminishes the natural magical abilities of whatever is being used. Practitioners aspected towards evil use multitudes of objects in any given spell, eking out what little magic they can, until their spell is powerful enough. It is thus less powerful than good-aspected spells, but significantly faster and easier to work. Example: An evil-aspected practitioner wishes to bury his enemy in rocks. To do this, he uses his overwhelming magical present to force the surrounding basalt aside, sending his enemy plummeting to his death. He must pay a price by eternally having his ankle turned by every basalt stone he happens to step on, until he learns to compel everything to his will wherever he goes. The Aspect of Neutrality The aspect of neutrality is a compromise between good and evil. It relies on bundling the generalized consent of a given magical element and applying it to a particular individual example of this element. Example: A neutral-aspected practitioner wishes to bury his enemy in rocks. He has taken out a contract with basalt, a contract which cost him dearly in several unmentionable respects. They obligingly throw his enemies deep into the earth and crush him, but push his contract renewal up a few months. The Aspect of Lawfulness A practitioner is aspected towards lawfulness when his magic is formalized in structured spells or rituals that work predictably. This allows the practitioner to have a convenient and predictable method of using his particular form of moral aspecting (i.e. lawful good or lawful evil). However, finding such a predictable method for more obstinate or independent elements often requires centuries of research. Furthermore, proto-sentient elements have a tendency of changing their minds about consent (for lawful good) or evolve resistancies to magical will (lawful evil) that make some formulas spurious or outdated. The Aspect of Chaos A practitioner of chaos prefers an intuitive approach to obtaining consent or imposing magical will. Frequently, this means that they never call the same magical effect in quite the same way twice, although they may use overarching generalizations or patterns. This works best with more obstinate elements (such as fire or helium) and with living things. The great majority of nature mages, for instance, are generally chaotic neutral mages who use incredible amounts of telepathy to discover the attitudes of magical elements.